A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
”Gateway to East European Documentaries” – that’s what the IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) calls its website DokWeb that I check out pretty often because of its information and articles, like the one by Filip Sebek, who has interviewed Russian…
Historien om digteren og maleren Gustaf Munch-Petersen (GM-P) er velkendt, i hvert fald blandt læsende mennesker i min generation. 26 år gammel forlod han sit hjem og sin gravide kone i Gudhjem for at drage til Spanien, som frivillig i…
It was a proud festival director Joan Gonzalez, who welcomed the audience to the final evening of the DocsBarcelona 2015 with the screening of Ivan Gergolet’s fine film about the 93 year old Maria Fux, ”Dancing With Maria”, followed by…
A very special day at the festival! First step was a visit to the fabulous Libreria Altaïr where ”el vermut de los sábados” this weekend was dedicated to a conversation with the DocsBarcelona directors of ”The Final Stretch” (Oscar Perez),…
It was a happy producer, Signe Byrge Sørensen, who checked messages on her i-phone here in Barcelona to find out that Chilean/German Estephan Wagner’s beautiful documentary ”Last Dreams”, produced by Final Cut for Real, had got the Audience Award at…
All right, a Dane writes about Danes, forgive me please – the photo is taken inside La Pedrera, one of Gaudi’s masterpieces in Barcelona where Signe Byrge Sørensen friday night held her masterclass giving around 40 people a personal insight…
He came into the cinema after the screening, the audience stood up and gave him a standing ovation after they had seen German Marcus Vetter’s portrait of him, ”The Forecaster”, alias Martin Armstrong or Marty as they call him in…
It’s wonderful when the ever perfect DocsBarcelona team makes a small mistake like the one on the photo announcing that the panelists of the Rough Cut Screenings that took place tuesday and wednesday were… yes, read for yourself. No, your…
For some years I have had the pleasure to host an exclusivity at DocsBarcelona: Rough Cut screenings. And it is rough cuts that are being screened in their full duration to a panel of hand-picked documentary professionals in a relaxed…
The winners of the MIDFFl Doker 2015 have been announced. The jury members (I was part of the one for feature duration documentaries) was working from their homes, the discussion, led by chairman Victor Kossakovsky, who demonstrated that he not…
I am in Barcelona, it’s summer, there is an outdoor pool outside my hotel window, and it is crowded. I am not here for holidays, DocsBarcelona has started with some events for professionals and tomorrow is the opening of the…
There have been masterclasses with Avi Mograbi and Michael Glawogger, world class directors of documentaries, at previous DocsBarcelona festivals. This year the festival has invited Signe Byrge Sørensen, producer of ”The Act of Killing” and ”The Look of Silence” AND…
The film of Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, a portrait of world star photographer Sebastião Salgado, runs in Danish theatres right now – go and watch it! Mikkel Stolt wrote about it at the Danish cph:dox premiere, here is…
There was champagne on the football pitch the other day in Madrid, where FC Barcelona won the Spanish League. And the Danish fan in his corner chair in the garden house took a cigar from the humidor and celebrated his…
Interesting article in Nonfics yesterday by Daniel Walber, a clever comment and reflection on the fact that the Cannes Film Festival has introduced a ”Oeil d’Or” (Golden Eye) award of €5000 with 14 films competing and with a jury that…
Kind and sweet and warm and knowledgeable Franz Grabner has died. I had the privilege to work with him for many years during my years at the EDN. He was many times at the Ex Oriente workshop and pitching in…
A bit into the beginning of the film I said to myself: OMG, is this a film where they are going to talk the whole way through! Of course I understood that the filmmakers had to make the viewer agree…
Realscreen is a useful source for information on what is going on in – that’s what they call it – non-fiction. Normally it is short news, sometimes however longer articles of fine quality like the one from May 1st by…
Respect! All right, we can get no official support due to the economical crisis, but we will make the festival anyway. We will finance it out of own pocket. This was the thought of a group of independent Russian filmmakers,…
So, there it is, the film about the Lithuanian photographer Vitas Luckus (1943-1987), his life, his art and first of all his love story with muse and wife, Tatyana. It is made by Giedre Zickyte, who has been working on…
… and the winner is, was the headline of the e-mail I received from Francesca Scalisi today. She sums up the experience with the Flying Film Festival, that she was initiating, like this: It went so well that probably we…
I have to go to words from literature, as we normally do when writing about films. This Ukrainian documentary is prose and poetry and essay at the same time. It is informative and emotional. You learn from it as you…
Newsletter from DocAlliance with generous offers to watch films FOR FREE in the month of May. Strong recommendation from me to (re)watch Jørgen Leth and Ole John’s ”66 Scenes from America” (photo: Andy Warhol and Jørgen Leth). This classic was…
Subtitled The Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival, DocAviv, 7-16.5.15, has launched its programme and it looks well thought and categorized in themes, that apart from the traditional Israeli and International competition are ”Art and Culture”, ”Art” and ”Depth of…
Simon Kilmurry will be missed in pitching sessions around the world. He has several times been nominated as the best commissioning editor at idfa in Amsterdam. Personally I have had the pleasure to moderate sessions, where he was a panelist…
She is nine years old, lives with her grandmother, her mother is ill and her father, she does not see a lot. This is the background that you pick up gradually as this sensitive, well-made and cleverly thought film goes…
I have to confess that I have no idea of what the young physicist Konstantin talks about to himself, when he sits writing his equations in his datcha or when he tries to make his students interested in physics at…
This is the kind of portrait documentary, where you learn a lot. In this case you watch the film with open mouth whispering to yourself, ”this can’t be true” even if you know from other media that this kind of…
Synopsis from director: This film tells the story of the previous year, that for me began, when Maidan had started and maybe didn’t end yet. The whole year we have lived in the atmosphere of revolution, then war. Whatever you…
A press release came in this morning from Andrea Pruchová, Doc Alliance. As usual well written and precise in information. Easy to quote from. As a true fan of Doc Alliance I hurry to bring you the newest from the…
This article is brought now because the film has its international premiere at HotDocs in Toronto , tomorrow, April 25. A long prologue: On this site Herz Frank (1926 – 2013) has an iconic status. Co-editor Allan Berg and I…
Thanks to a Cineuropa website (very actual, well written and edited, covering also a lot of documentary events and films) and a link from the article, I got to know about the Play-Doc 2015 festival (Festival Internacional de Documentals) that…
The 46th (!) edition of Visions du Réel is going on with still a couple of days left. Before the festival Doc Alliance brought an interview with the festival director for some years, Luciano Barisone, a man who is not…
The 30th edition of the DOK.fest in Munich invites the audience to watch five of the Israeili documentary master Avi Mograbi’s films. Mograbi travels apparently from one (well deserved) homage to the other, last one was in Paris at the…
At the beginning of March I posted a text about a great initiative taken by young filmmakers – Francesca Scalisi and Mark Olexa – both graduated years ago from the Zelig Film School in Bolzano: ”The festival will start beginning…
… at DOK Leipzig, a press release announces from the festival. Like American presidents the new director of the important festival has chosen to reveal her changes after her first 100 days in office! Here comes most of the press…
Of course IDF (Institute of Documentary Film) stands behind this wonderful initiative, it calls itself “Project Father and Mother”, but there are other well-known partners – One World Romania Association (Bucharest, Romania), Restart (Zagreb, Croatia), Mozinet (Budapest, Hungary) and Filmtopia…
Apropos the sad news about the Avala Studio in Belgrade, here is a written flashback to a night at the Sava Center at the closing night of the Magnificent7 2011: It was one of those evenings that you will never…
Dear friends, guests and colleagues of MAGNIFICENT 7 Festival, we’ve got a terribly important issue to share with you, hoping you will react, sign the petition and spread the word about the unthinkable events that are about to take place…
It’s not because he says something new, Iikka Vehkalahti, who is now out of YLE, Finnish public television, active as always with different international activities, one of them being the rough cut service that he has set up together with…
In my sculpture, I attempt to detach myself from the subject. Although my earlier works were rather expressionistic with oubursts against war, crime and violence in general, I now find my most successful pieces are less topical and idiographic. They…
In documentary workshops and film schools all over I have forbidden the participants to use the term ”poetic” talking about films. It’s banal, over-used and what does it really mean? Nevertheless this is the only word to be used for…
After five days of watching documentaries on a big screen in Palm Springs, USA, back to the MacBook Pro screen to promote another fine offer from the unique DocAlliance, this time linked to the Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel…
Marseille. The city of Zinedine Zidane. A multicultural melting pot with areas/quartiers, where violence is a daily menu with gangs operating, murders and huge social problems. If Zidane is an icon for football fans, Yvan Sorel is it for practioners…
Esther’s father married and divorced 5 times. Why? And how might that influence my life, the director wants to find out and makes a film that ends with footage from her own marriage, where she is walking the aisle with…
Peter Bogdanovich joked about himself, ”I master the namedrop”, he said, referring to his enormous knowledge of films and film stars, actors and directors. What I am about to do now is precisely the same, namedropping, films and directors, which…
Sunday morning in the Camelot Theatres in Palm Springs. The headline of the morning discussion in the festival’s panel series is ”The Mating of Documentary & Narrative Cinematography”. And the panelists are ”Award winning D.P.’s Haskell Wexler ASC, Joan Churchill…
A morning seminar moderated by English film critic Neil Young. Subject: International Film Festivals. What to remember if you go to them as an American documentarian. 20 people listening, asking questions. Basic information was given, especially from Neil Young, who…
Ohhh, film history and personal history for me as for many others, I am sure. Let’s get the last matter settled first: When I was studying at the Library school in Copenhagen in the beginning of the 1970’es, my teacher…
Had they pitched this project in Europe, producers and financiers would have hesitated committing themselves as the brothers are debutants. And would have continued ”don’t start before you have all the money”. In this respect there is a difference between…